Every line of JavaScript and JSON that I write takes inspiration from NeWS! But that's just me.

NeWS differs from the current technology stack in that it was all coherently designed at once by James Gosling and David Rosenthal, by taking several steps back and thinking deeply about all the different problems it was trying to solve together. So it's focused and expressed in one single language, instead of the incoherent fragmented Tower of Babel of many other ad-hoc languages that we're stuck with today.

I summarized the relationship of NeWS with modern technology in the wikipedia article:

>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

Another thing that REALLY inspires me, which goes a hell of a lot further than NeWS ever did, and is one of the best uses of JavaScript I've ever seen, is the Snap! visual programming language!

It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems.

Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc).

>The eCraft2Learn project is developing a set of extensions to the Snap! programming language to enable children (and non-expert programmers) to build AI programs. You can use all the AI blocks after importing this file into Snap! or Snap4Arduino. Or you can see examples of using these blocks inside this Snap! project.